


Perigee

by psalloacappella



Series: Particles [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Astronomy Theme, Blank Period, Existential Musing, Experimental Style, F/M, POV Second Person, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27446803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psalloacappella/pseuds/psalloacappella
Summary: In the future you’ll emerge from pilgrimage as three, clutching a girl new and fragile marveling at it all, the love you never thought you’d have, of which you were so sure you were not capable.But you don’t know this now.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke
Series: Particles [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1919686
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	Perigee

**Author's Note:**

> **per·i·gee**  
>  /ˈperəˌjē/  
> Astronomy  
> the point in the orbit of the moon or a satellite at which it is nearest to the earth
> 
> lightly edited, experimental, as always I love hearing from you

❦

Every day upon awakening, you marvel and wonder why she’s still at your side. 

Nights sharply yield to bright days dissolving into ashen light of the moon, footfalls moving with the calm rotation of the earth and a life that’s become tender and fainéant.

You’d be remiss to say you’d prefer it any other way.

At once you are fragile strangers and old friends, shorn feathers wafting loose in the wind and carved idols branded with the heroic imprints of war, its ending of which you were both instrumental. 

As before, so on that field — she’s the hairline fracture in your heart, finespun in appearance but devastating in its divinity. Because the truth is you have always known your weakness is her affection, unadorned and scrubbed by light and always focusing on nothing but you.

In circles flap round robins of thought: Id, ego, superego. Deliverance, grace, and lapsing again into base and frenzied indulgences (but how can that be, if she returns it all in ardor?)

the way you touch her gently and sometimes with fire

the way you put yourself on trial because you’re undeserving

and the way you mediate between both, trying to sink into her orbit without scaring her away.

Luckily for you, she knows. She’s seen your insides, all glitter and coal. 

This love moves fast, and it’s not only you: From gentle brushes to intertwined fingers (and really, you’ve already been here, it’s just another forest in another age blessed with another type of terror) to the way she turns those jade eyes on you across a fire crackling with all your shared tension and the echoes of sins. 

Under sublime stars you kiss her and whisper stupid things; the universe knows, hears them despite the light years in between but when it aims to warn you in phosphorescence and knowing glimmers they’re disregarded, debris, half-life cosmos decay from a galaxy away. 

You’ve never quite heeded divine warnings well anyway.

Instead, she cradles your face while holding the gaze of your mismatched eyes that see everything except the love right in front of you.

You know now, in a way not understood before, that things trouble her in silence and she paints on beautiful smiles meant to beguile fools. Wondering how long it's been since she’s known someone who sees her through and through. 

As you learn one another’s habits a troubling behavior emerges — the way she stares at the open canvas of her hands as memorizing archaic runes while firelight dances and teases the tiny scars, the deep-running tributary of her lifeline. It is an unsettling shift and realization: She is and yet is not _exactly_ the girl you knew.

Inherently you know this. She’s seen things deeper and darker than genin days in large part due to you but also a constellation of terrors you’re not privy to, perhaps should never be, yet you would take all of it on if it meant she could relinquish burdens which you find, weighing on her, devastating. 

“Nothing,” she murmurs when you ask her, occasionally in a sharp tone though many times in a whisper and often, so often, just by the way you stare. Then she’ll blink, tune back into your shared reality as a lost radio channel, endlessly scanning and now found. Slipping back into orbit; coming back to earth. “It’s nothing, Sasuke-kun. Tired, is all.”

Her lies don’t work on you, they’re flimsy at best. Emboldened by the masks they’re letting slip away, the control they’re giving up

_because when his hand grips the devastating slope of her waist and the camber of her hip and she rides him like he’s the last thing on earth he’s fucking lost, nothing else matters,_

you express it in your often tactless fashion.

“What idiots,” you ask, “have you been fooling with that?” What men, you’re wondering, have you bewitched and why?

“Your best friend,” she says, haughty. “And Kaka-sensei, and everyone else who has their own problems, that don’t need to hear mine.”

“Perhaps you don’t deceive them as well as you believe.”

Scraping together the remnants of her rice and remains, she gently tips the small mound from her chopsticks into your bowl. 

“Perhaps.”

Somehow thinking you were the only one in pain or the only broken one licking your wounds and starving. _Needing._ Perhaps you’re forgetting to really look at her again, blink away her brightness and try to catch hold of the ragged edge of shadow.

Lingering just out of sight, begging for a glance.

This time you cage her gently, settling her between your legs in the dirt in the company of another fire under a grey waning gibbous. Her embarrassment surfaces less and less, though it’s endearing considering the fact you’ve seen and held every glorious inch. With her back against your chest, she tips her head back onto your shoulder to press warm lips to the line of your jaw. 

Gooseflesh and compulsion. You think of being inside of her, skin, whispers, and the dangerous hold she has on your heart (and sometimes limbs.)

But it returns under this moon, the slippage, the schism. Now you see her hands shaking and plain and scarred and you realize you _don’t_ know where they come from and it’s been a given all along that both your bodies bear marks and cicatrixes, marred shinobi, tiny but numerous imperfections sustained in your roles as tools.

You stare at her hands as salvation sweetly given; she regards them with abject terror.

The place where her hair meets the skin draws you in, your lips exploring the inviting seam. How do you know in that moment you’ll never have to search for it again? Eyes like yours are simply fruitless with love like this.

“What do you see?” you mutter in her long pink locks. “Where are you?”

Nothing, for a long moment. Then: 

“You start forgetting them.”

The bridge of your nose buried in her hair.

“At first you think their ghosts will never leave,” she continues, still with her hands out, palms up on display. “The glassy eyes, their final breaths. And you can’t sleep when you think of it, even though I’ve broken many a body, can do it without even trying. But it’s duty, the thing you’ve been forged into, and what we’re told to do.”

Hands blanched in the dim light, firelight daubing orange in shifting waves across her lifeline.

“Eventually, though, you stop counting.”

“Are these people you’ve killed, or people you’ve lost?” You ask quietly, afraid to prompt emotional flight.

(But then, she’s not _you,_ is she?) 

“Once they’ve crossed over, they all look just about the same.”

You reach around to slide your rough fingers underneath the back of her hand; she splays her fingers wider at your touch, blooming as some sun-seeking perennial. 

A thumb on her lifeline, tracing the fateful fjord, a rivulet of salvation. 

“How do I do both?” 

On your arm, you feel a single icy and resolute tear.

“Why am _I,_ of all people, some gatekeeper between worlds? Life and death? I don’t deserve responsibility like that.”

Contrary, contrary — you think she’s the only one who _should,_ not because she’s light in the dark or spring in the winter or any romantic nor poetic notion. But because she’s formidable and talented and unbending when it truly matters, unsurpassed in her loyalty though never blind, and the safest place to ensconce your heart. 

Your thumb traces her lifeline repetitiously in a warning to wayward interference — because you and Death have some understanding, a covenant that’s different among each and every earthly creature with its own commandments. Yours is clear: She is the loving tether to this life, and if hers is severed, so is mine.

You hate that she feels helpless and wavering in a life’s purpose so fitting and the only thing that’s managed to keep you alive — not just above ground, not just keeping a heart beating or lungs breathing but absolutely the only thing that makes sense in the chaos of a vengeful life.

Her.

“I have no doubt,” you murmur, “that you’ve always done your best.”

“It’s not about doing my best. I’ve hurt people with these.”

“You’ve healed people with these,” you insist. 

“It’s not a set of scales!” 

Too late, you realize that sharp shudder and crack is a sob. Something aches in your chest. Heartburn, heartbreak. 

“It’s not one for one. Just because I healed someone doesn’t make up for sending one to the other side. For making that choice.” 

In this moment you know her pact with Death is quite different in some way you’ve never understood, despite all your pensive rumination. Again, managing to miss such obvious things. You’ll continue to, learning from them, and all these moments cobbled together will manifest as affection you’re unable to fathom.

(In the future you’ll emerge from pilgrimage as three,

clutching a girl new and fragile marveling at it all, the love you never thought you’d have, of which you were so sure you were not capable.

But you don’t know this now.)

“This—” pressing your thumb into her palm, gripping her tightly, “— is your talent and hard work. You’ve earned this.” Brushing an errant scar, you add, “You wield this with principle. Entrusted with the choice, and sometimes you’ll find yourself as adjudicator.”

As surely as you know this, with conviction, Death laughs at you in shadows. Ah, it’s only fair. After all you’ve realized, too, that for all the times you’ve considered yourself its friend, holding her in your arms and knowing the inside of her heart has lifted this veil. 

It’s _her_ that stands sentry at the demarcation line — no gods nor ghosts have sanction. Upon leaving, and you will someday, it’s this you will feel and hear and see and clutch

_scented fruit and tilled earth and faint antiseptic_

“Why? How do you know?” 

Placing her other hand on yours to enclose you. Shivering at her divine touch. 

“I _know._ ”

Murmuring in her ear, rooting her to the forest floor, the moon brightening in eventide as you hear the sharp intake of breath and possibly, even, her head reeling, stars wheeling, falling into orbit with the placid curvature of the earth — 

“After all, these hands healed even me.” 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> so this wasn't an "official" challenge per se, but something born out of a friend and I bouncing ideas (and existential crises) back and forth. The themes of purpose, the moon and the earth, the idea of orbit, fate, are not new ones - they sort of end up being an endless thing I muse on and show up in one way or another in my other works.


End file.
